Are bonds sacrosanct?

In most of the organizations mentioned, the bonds that an employee is required to sign almost always extend well beyond the training period. The main reason behind this, as has been mentioned in various other posts, is the interest of the company in making sure that it’s investment on the employee does not go waste in the event of the employee leaving the organization. The question that I would like to bring up here is the extent to which these bonds are actually adhered to. Are these bonds applicable to all the employees uniformly throughout the organization? Are the bonds actually strictly adhered to word by word? Who takes the responsibility of making sure that the clauses in the bond are followed?

As far as my experience with my previous employer goes, the answer to the first question would definitely be a “No”. Uniformity of a bond cannot be guaranteed across an organization. There have been many instances where relaxation has been provided to employees over a part of the payment and in some cases the entire amount of the bond. These deviations from the rule can be attributed mostly to the good relationships that these employees shared with their immediate reporting managers. These managers take up their cases with the higher management and are more often than not successful in getting the bond amount waived off. In most of the IT industries, there exists a clause in the bond that requires the employees to serve a notice period of around three months between submitting their resignation and quitting. This period is usually used to carry out the knowledge transfer activities. However, the scope of this clause is also not uniform throughout the organization and varies from employee to employee and project to project depending on the complexities of the task at hand.

Thus, it can be safely assumed that the very concept of bonds and their implementation is quite subjective and is to a large extent dependent on various external factors. The signing of a bond does not guarantee its implementation, most of the times there are various other complexities involved in their execution.